117It should be borne in mind that the action brought by the applicant against the conditional clearance decision of 7 January 2004 was dismissed by the General Court, that the Court of Justice dismissed the appeal brought against the General Court’s judgment and that those judgments are therefore binding on the parties to the dispute. The judgments dismissing the action and the appeal have such binding force, the only consequence of which is to render inadmissible any new action with the same subject-matter, involving the same parties and based on the same cause of action (Hoogovens Groep v Commission, 172/83 and 226/83, ECR, EU:C:1985:355, paragraph 9). A judgment dismissing an action or an appeal does not therefore mean that the contested act is valid, but only that none of the pleas in law raised by the applicant was well-founded and that the same was true of the pleas concerning a matter of public policy which the Court must raise of its own motion. Consequently, the contested act continues to benefit from a presumption of legality, which also imposes upon all persons subject to Union law the obligation to acknowledge that that act is fully effective so long as it has not been declared to be unlawful (Granaria, 101/78, ECR, EU:C:1979:38, paragraph 5). As the conditional clearance decision of 7 January 2004 was the subject of an action dismissed by a judgment of the General Court which was confirmed by the Court of Justice, that act must be considered to benefit from a presumption of legality.